Frontera
2017 · 7m · Ecuador
Directed by Fabián Guamaní Aldaz
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
1941. In a territory where an armed conflict is being fought, a child plays at war. One day he finds a wounded soldier and decides to take care of him; soon the game ends and he must face reality.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
War-as-children's-game is a premise everyone expects to be heavy-handed, and Guamaní Aldaz refuses to lean into the obvious irony—that restraint is almost radical, though it plays it safer than it thinks.
A formally precise study in threshold moments: the editing holds the collision between play and violence with genuine rigor, and the mise-en-scène recalls a lineage of Latin American cinema that treats childhood as philosophical terrain, not sentiment.
The decision to keep the soldier mostly off-screen until the absolute moment of contact—letting us inhabit only the child's imaginative space—is the whole film; everything else serves that one structural choice, and it lands.